The Kingston A1000, an M.2 solid-state drive, is yet another of the many PCI Express-bus NVMe SSDs that has seen a major price drop in the past year.
The trend in 2019 is toward PCI Express drives inching closer and closer to SATA SSD pricing, and this 3D TLC NAND-based drive ($169.99 in the 960GB capacity we tested) is a budget choice for anyone who also doesn't mind a bit of matching, stepped-down performance.
Although the read speeds were fine for the cost tier the A1000 falls into, its write speeds left something to be desired.
Our advice? The A1000 is fine if you find it on an aggressive sale, but you can find better budget drives out there at this price.
In SSDs, a Slow Race to the Bottom
The Kingston A1000 sample I tested is a 960GB M.2-format drive, at the 80mm length (Type-2280), which means it will fit on most M.2 laptop and desktop-board configurations that aren't space-strapped.
It's a PCI Express Gen 3.0 x2 SSD.
The drive comes with its own pre-installed heat spreader, without frills apart from the black-and-white color scheme emblazoned with the company's logo.
On the software side of things, the Kingston Storage Manager (KSM) is rather a lightweight in terms of what it lets you do, versus tools such as Crucial's Storage Executive.
In the KSM, you'll be able to check the health of your drive and its operating temperature, update the firmware, and...well, that's about it.
The option to utilize Secure Erase was greyed out on the A1000 (though not on the sibling Kingston HyperX Savage boot SSD installed in our storage testbed).
Prices for SSDs have been falling sharply over the past year, primarily due to those two eternal market factors: oversupply and under-demand.
Early last year, the flash-storage industry was bracing for a rush on NAND-based memory chips that didn't come to pass at the scale expected, leaving manufacturers with a glut of NAND supply.
(For more on NAND and other SSD jargon, check out our SSD terms explainer.)
At the same time, the industry is pushing hard into 96-layer NAND fabrication technology, up from the 32-layer and 64-layer technologies that preceded it.
This, inherently, means that costs will go down as chips become more efficient at storing more data in less space, and older versions need to be cleared off shelves before consumers view them as obsolete.
Thus, today's price wars and the state of SSD pricing.
Drives that cost more than $400 at a 1TB capacity before the glut retail for barely half of that today.
And that has meant that the budget-SSD sector has had to get creative when costing out its step-up drive types (notably, PCI Express NVMe ones) that used to demand a nontrivial premium over SATA-based drives.
The 960GB version of the Kingston A1000 I have on hand is at the higher end of the "budget" spectrum.
It's not the absolute cheapest, but also not nearly as pricey as other competing options in this category.
Calculating off the $169.99 MSRP for the 960GB capacity comes to 17 cents per gigabyte, and as a result, the A1000 butts heads on either side with the likes of the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro ($119.95 at Amazon) and the Mushkin Pilot (18 cents and 13 cents per gigabyte, respectively), while also being drastically undercut by heavy hitters in the space such as the Crucial P1 (12 cents per gigabyte).
The A1000 also comes in two other capacities, 240GB and 480GB, which cost $49.99 (20 cents per gigabyte) and $84.99 (17 cents per gigabyte), respectively.
With a 600 terabytes written (TBW) rating for the 960GB version, the A1000 is in the midrange as far as durability is concerned, but the company backs up the drive with a limited five-year warranty that only expires if the time runs out or you exceed the TBW capacity before then.
Let's Get Benchmarking...
Kingston rates the A1000 at 1,500MBps for sequential reads, and 1,000MBps sequential writes.
In PC Labs' benchmark testing, it was able to keep up with (and even mildly exceed) those rates.
That said, given that it is a two-lane PCI Express NVMe drive using 64-layer 3D TLC NAND, we weren't expecting it to shatter any records, given that mainstream and performance drives today make use of four PCI Express lanes.
And indeed, in other key tests, it performed under the mark for both its cost bracket and drive type.
First up is UL's PCMark 8 Storage subtest, which simulates everyday disk accesses in tasks such as editing photos and web browsing.
These results aren't out of the norm, but it's rare to see much deviation in this benchmark across PCI Express-bus drives.
Once we get to the A1000's Crystal DiskMark Sequential Q32T1 read results, it looks near competitive with the Crucial P1.
However, its write speeds on this test are significantly slower than the similarly priced ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro.
The Crystal DiskMark Sequential tests simulate best-case, straight-line transfers of large files.
In contrast, the 4K (or "random read/write") tests simulate typical processes involved in program/game loads or bootup sequences.
Here, the drive's Crystal DiskMark 4K results are behind the PCI Express NVMe bell curve.
Last up is a series of file and folder transfers done in the AS-SSD benchmarking utility.
In these tests, the benchmarking utility is copying large files or folders from one location on the test drive to another.
On these tests, the A1000 shows a bit more life, even beating the Crucial P1 ($58.80 at Amazon) on the ISO file-transfer test.
However, that's the only win it scored against that or any drive in our overall comparison.
An x2 Drive in an Aggressive SSD World
While the A1000 meets the speed standards set by Kingston (and even surpasses them in some cases), it's well below the expectations set by its NVMe SSD competition, without enough of a price offset.
In an age where SSDs are not only getting faster, but also cheaper per gigabyte, by the month, makers like Kingston and their budget drives like the A1000 prove that price war takes no prisoners.
For budget-minded buyers who need capacity on cheap over the maximum possible raw performance, the A1000 can make sense.
But you need to see it on an aggressive sale before it becomes a must-buy versus stronger drives from the likes of ADATA or Mushkin.
